3 Planning Your Portal

3.1 Using Page Groups Effectively

A portal is simply a collection of one or more page groups. This chapter will give you some pointers to help you decide how many page groups you’ll need, but keep in mind that each page group usually has a focus that is largely determined by its viewership:

• Page groups devoted to viewers tend to focus on the presentation of the content itself, as opposed to managing that content. Because viewers don’t have the privileges necessary to publish content, they become the consumers of information that is published by others. Where that content is managed--in the same or in a different page group--is completely immaterial to the viewers of the content.

  Content typically produced for the consumption of viewers includes:

  • Announcements of corporate programs, events, quarterly earning reports, and so on

  • Reports that enable users to acquire information and/or make key business decisions

  • News, weather, and stock quotes from syndicated content feeds

  • Availability of email, calendar, meeting scheduling tools, and other heavily used business applications

  • Smaller portals created and maintained by independent departments within the company

  • Business documents and other information published by fellow employees

  The following illustration depicts the convergence of many disparate information sources to a single page:

  Figure 3-1 Information Sources for a Page

  
  Description of the illustration basics06.gif
  
  

  The presentation of this information is frequently augmented by typical portal services like personalization (the ability for users to specify their own preferences for color schemes, the content that appears, and the layout and content of a page), as well as a sophisticated search engine to help users locate critical information quickly.

• Page groups can also be configured to meet the needs of content contributors working in a collaborative manner. In this type of page group, which is tuned for content management, self-service publishing features allow end users to post and share any kind of document or Web content with other users, even those geographically dispersed. For example, consider a development group consisting of engineers, product managers, and quality assurance engineers working at locations scattered all over the world. Each has documents they need to share with members of their own teams as well as the other groups. Nearly every user has the ability to add documents to the page group; certain users have privileges to modify documents produced by other users or groups.

  Unlike more generalized page groups, a content management page group relies heavily on OracleAS Portal’s assortment of collaboration features:

  • Check-in/check-out capabilities, so that users cannot overwrite each others changes

  • Version control, so that successive versions of a particular item can be retained or overwritten

  • A security mechanism, by which content can be protected from unauthorized view or manipulation

  • Workflow, which establishes a process through which a document or request flows among users

  • Organizational mechanisms to create a content structure that is easily browsed by the portal user

  If you’re operating in a small environment, with no company firewall or no plans to make content available outside your firewall, you may find that a content management page group is sufficient for your needs. Or, you may want your content contributors to produce and edit their business documents in such a page group, and use the page portlet (or the autoquery feature of the custom search portlet) to expose those documents to viewers, either within a set of pages just for them or within a different page group entirely.

  You’ll probably want to read this chapter entirely before deciding how many page groups you’ll need and the focus of each. Your ability to make these key decisions wisely will have a far-reaching effect on the final usability of your portal.

3.2 Making Key Decisions

This section is intended to give you an idea of the things you’ll need to consider as you set up your portal, in the rough order in which you’ll need to consider them.

• Deciding how to structure your portal is perhaps the biggest and most difficult challenge you’ll face. Consider the breadth of content you have, as well as each discrete group of users you’re trying to satisfy as you decide whether you need multiple page groups or just one:

  • What is the relative size of your user base? Does it make sense to contain your portal in a single page group, with a home page and perhaps one page (or one page with sub-pages) devoted to the needs of each user group? Is your user population small enough so you can develop the entire site in a single page with tabs?

  • It is fairly likely that you will have users who wish to publish business documents and other information to the page group (that is, content contributors), as well as users who will merely consume that information (in other words, viewers). How should those two groups interact? Do you want content contributors to create, edit, and publish the content on the same page where it is viewed? Or do you want to have a separate area in which content contributors can work, then use page portlets and custom searches to present relevant information to viewers? To help make this decision, consider whether the creators of the information are vastly different from the consumers of the information.

    Suppose you have a group of engineers that will be producing a great deal of content. You want them to be able to create their page structure naturally, without having to yield to a formal set of guidelines and standards. Because the consumers of much of this information are not engineers, however, the potentially unwieldy page structure that might result could well be distracting or confusing to its non-technical audience. In this case, it’s best if the developers be allowed to publish as they wish, and for you to superimpose a structure that is natural and pleasing to the consumers using custom searches and page portlets. If the consumers and the creators are one and the same, however, there’s no reason that content creation and consumption can’t occur on the same page(s).

    See Configuring a Page Group for Content Management for more information on how to create a page group devoted to content management.

  • Will different groups expect their search results to be confined to their own areas? By default, the search feature combs all pages belonging to the page group to which the current page belongs.^Foot 1  If you think your Human Resources group will want their search to be limited to just the data that is relevant to them, consider creating separate page groups for each group within your enterprise.

  If you do decide to create multiple page groups, you’ll probably want to develop some common objects and place them in the Shared Objects page group so that you can achieve some consistency across work performed by the different groups. Only objects (navigation pages, templates, styles, and so on) in the Shared Objects page group can be used across multiple page groups.

• Do you want each of the pages within your portal to look similar? One way to accomplish this is through the use of templates. You can build a template that has a common navigation bar, footer, and banner, then leave it up to individual content contributors to populate the remainder of the page with content. You might also want to create one template for each user group to clearly identify the page as belonging to that group.

  Note: Although you cannot force your page designers/builders to use your template, you can make it the default so that it is the first template listed in the drop-down list in the Page Creation wizard.

• Establish page group wide properties, such as the amount of space to allocate to uploaded files, the default style, navigation page, and page template, and what type of items contributors can add to pages in the page group. You can identify such things as:

  • What level of access will each user or user group have on the pages created within this page group?

  • What template will be selected by default when a new page is created?

  • What navigation page will be selected by default for use as a banner when a new page is created?

  • What style will be applied by default when a new page is created?

  • Will users of this page group be allowed to apply user interface templates to their pages? User interface templates govern what is displayed around the page, whereas page templates govern the appearance and content of the page itself.

  Page group-wide settings are made through the Navigator. On the Page Groups tab, click Properties next to your page group.

• Create, or have your graphics designer create, a style for your portal to determine the colors and fonts used by the pages in the page group. Later on, you can indicate whether page designers can change this style as they develop their pages and/or whether users who are viewing the pages can apply their own style preferences to the page.

• Create your home page.

  • Decide how many regions you will need.

  • Create, or have your graphics designer create, a navigation bar and banner. You may also want to consider using a footer for links to related sites and Web pages.

  • Add portlets and items to your page.

  • Establish security for the page.

  Repeat this process for each page you want to create.

Remember, as page group administrator, you are in charge of not only making decisions that affect the page group as a whole, but also for developing the procedure by which the content on your portal is developed and maintained. You’ll probably want to delegate a good deal of the authority for page creation to others so you don’t become a bottleneck.

3.3 Configuring a Page Group for Content Management

Building a content management page group involves many of the same considerations as any other type of page group. There are some additional things you need to consider that are unique to an environment in which users are creating content. These things include:

• Will a single page group meet your content management needs? Or will you need more than one? Consider the following:

  • How many groups of content contributors do you have? How different are their needs?

  • Are the content attribution needs different for each group of content contributors? Your Travel department might require categories such as Hotels, Air Fares, and Rental Cars, while your Financial group needs categories like Statements, Forecasts, and Data Sheets. Then again, you may deliberately want to develop a taxonomy that is general enough to satisfy all users, regardless of departmental role.

  • What is the amount of information produced by each group? Does the amount suggest that each group or department may require its own page group?

  • Do you need to implement different controls for different groups within your organization? If so, you’ll want to set up multiple page groups to address these needs. For example, one group may need to keep multiple versions of their files intact, while others don’t require this capability. Or you may want to limit the file size for one particular group. To get an idea of the kinds of settings you can control at the page group level, click Properties in the Navigator next to your default page group and take a look at the fields on each tab.

  If you do decide to create multiple page groups to support content management, you’ll probably want to develop some common objects and place them in the Shared Objects page group so that you can achieve some consistency across work performed by the different groups. Only objects (navigation pages, templates, styles, and so on) in the Shared Objects page group can be used across multiple page groups.

• Within a page group, can you keep the editing experience fairly simple? Doing so may make it easier for content contributors to add content to your portal. For example, consider creating a template consisting of a very simple layout: a banner, a navigation area along the left side, a footer, and a content region in the center. For all regions except the main content region, you can de-select the check box Enable Users To Include Content In This Region (one of the region properties). When content contributors access this page, they will see edit controls only in the main content region, thus providing a more streamlined, simplified editing experience.

• Examine the item types provided by OracleAS Portal. Are they sufficient for your needs? Will you require additional attributes, or would you like to remove some attributes defined by default? For example, files may have authors, create dates, or keywords associated with them. You may want to include additional attributes, so that you can use the Custom Search portlet to build pre-configured searches based on a given attribute. With the Custom Search portlet, you can collect data together irrespective of category, perspective, item type, and so on. For example, you might want to regularly publish all reports belonging to the category For Review on a weekly basis. To do that, you can use the Publish attribute to specify dates greater than the previous week’s publish date. If you construct your attributes wisely, you’ll have a great deal of flexibility when creating custom searches.

• How much control do you want to give your page designers and content contributors? Should your page designers be allowed to create sub-pages?

• Establish page group wide properties, including:

  • What level of versioning do you want to enable for all pages in the page group?

  • How do you want to handle the deletion of items? Should the items be "soft-deleted" so that a page manager can "undelete" them later?

  • What template will be selected by default when a new page is created?

  • How long should the New and Updated icons appear beside new and updated items?

  • What navigation page will be selected by default for use as a banner when a new page is created?

  • What style will be applied by default when a new page is created?

  • What item types will be available to users creating new pages?

• Will your users want to use Web Folders to add content to their pages? Web Folders is a Microsoft OS extension that supports the WebDAV protocol. After configuring Web Folders on a user’s computer, the user can browse the contents of any page group through Windows Explorer and drag and drop files into any page to which they have access.

• Do you need to establish any approval or other types of workflow chains so that documents or requests can move from one user to another?

3.4 Publishing Content

Although your work as page group administrator may not require you to actually create the content displayed in your portal, you no doubt will have a role in determining what kind of content is required and possibly assisting others in producing that content. You will most likely need to work closely with developers at your site, who have the responsibility for building components and/or portlets for others to include on their pages. Some of the things that need to be considered in the arena of content creation are:

• Are there any reports, charts, forms, or other components you’d like to display? Assuming that the data required is already in the OracleAS Portal or another enterprise database, you can create these components yourself without the assistance of a developer.^Foot 2  Simply go to the Navigator, click the Providers tab, then click Create New... Portal DB Provider at the top. Then click the name of the application in the Navigator’s Name column to display a list of the components you can create. If you require assistance, use the online help.

• You may need to sift through hundreds or thousands of Web sites to find appropriate content. Make your job easier using Web Clipping portlet. Web Clipping portlet offers an easy, intuitive way to capture content and functionality from existing Web sites and present them as portlets. Create Web clippings on the fly by navigating to the source Web page and selecting the portion of the page to clip.

• Publish Web Service, XML, or CSV (comma separated value, also known as spreadsheet) data easily using OmniPortlet. OmniPortlet essentially separates the content publishing from the content layout. Whereas changing a portlet’s layout often involves regathering the data, with OmniPortlet you can experiment with layouts at will, without ever having to regenerate the data itself. See the online help for more information.

• Browse through the Portlet Repository and see if any of the portlets provided by OracleAS Portal will be useful to you. You may also want to check, or have someone else check, the Knowledge Exchange to see if you can incorporate any of the work done by other OracleAS Portal developers. In addition, be sure to peruse the Portal Catalog, an impressive collection of portlets and services offered by our OracleAS Portal Partners. You can see the full list of partners and get a brief description of their offerings at http://portalcatalog.oracle.com.

• To publish static information, such as corporate announcements or press releases, use text items. For Internet Explorer users, text items can be authored with an integrated Rich Text Editor which, when enabled,^Foot 3  provides a WYSIWYG interface for creating formatted HTML. For Netscape users, or when the Rich Text Editor has been disabled, text can still be entered through the browser into a standard HTML text area. The text item can contain plain text (to which formatting is applied from the page or region style sheet) or text with embedded HTML formatting tags. You can also create your text items by cutting and pasting existing HTML text into the text item.

• Much of your content will probably come from documents produced by fellow employees. If their work has been loaded into OracleAS Portal and the correct attributes have been supplied, you’ll find that the Custom Search portlet is an excellent means for gathering documents together based on a common set of criteria and displaying them in a portlet. In a nutshell, the Custom Search portlet allows you to define a complex set of portal search criteria that executes a search each time the page is rendered. You may want to display all documents created by the Human Resources department in one portlet, for example, and create another portlet with all the internal forms employees may need to reference, irrespective of which department created them. To use the Custom Search portlet, add it to your page from the Portlet Repository, then use the Edit Defaults action to establish your search criteria.

• Do you want to display syndicated content? Syndicated content comes from an external source, such as a WebDAV server or a file system. Your portal administrator decides which content to subscribe to, and specifies which pages within the portal should receive the syndicated content. The portal administrator can also set things up so that information on your page is shared with others through the subscription services offered by the Oracle Syndication Server. (For a page to receive or send syndicated content, the PORTAL_SYNDICATION user must have the Manage or Manage Items With Approval privilege on the page.) See the Oracle Application Server Portal Configuration Guide for information on how to subscribe to syndicated content.

• What kinds of applications are required? Do you have third-party or in-house applications you want to make accessible to your user base? If so, your developers can choose among several paths, ranging from the simple to the more complex:

  • Include the application in the External Applications portlet, then add the portlet to a commonly accessed page.

  • Assuming that the application is Web-enabled, use a Web Clipping, iFrame, or URL portlet to display the application’s home page.

  • Use the Portal Developer Kit (PDK) to transform the application into a portlet provider. By doing so, discrete areas of the application can then become portlets that can be manipulated individually.